The Big Tech Backlash Is Reaching a Tipping Point

As Facebook, Google, and Twitter lose the faith of their lawmakers and the trust of their users, a paradigm shift seems underway in Silicon Valley.

TWITTER EARNS

Bloomberg

Twitter was not always best known as Donald Trump’s preferred method for amplifying anti-Muslim hate videos or making empty threats to pull NBC News off the air over coverage he disagrees with. There was a time, during 2010’s Arab Spring, when Twitter (and Facebook, and YouTube) were linked with monumental grassroots political revolution. “It wasn’t about the technology; it was about the people,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has said of his platform as a political organizing tool. “It just happens to be that Twitter was the right tool at the right place and right time.” But while Big Tech platforms have enjoyed several years of good P.R., upheld as pivotal democratizing forces that made life better overall, the era of good feelings appears to be behind them as everyone from lawmakers to Luddites to their own current and former employees turns against them in a paradigm shift that is rapidly accelerating.

This backlash to tech is not a particularly new sentiment—it’s one that’s been echoed by the likes of Sean Parker, one of Facebook’s earliest investors and the company’s first president, and former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya. “Do I feel guilty? Absolutely I feel guilt,” Palihapitiya told CNN regarding his role in Facebook’s emergence as a tool with the power to sway elections. “Nobody ever thought that you could have such a massive manipulation of the system. You can see the reaction of the people who run these companies. They never thought it was possible.” Parker says he doesn’t know if he understood the ramifications of growing Facebook to a network of more than 2 billion monthly users. “It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” he told Axios’s Mike Allen. “It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

While outrage percolates over Google, Facebook, and Twitter’s roles in Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the roots of the discontent appear to go deeper. Lawmakers are now questioning big data and algorithms on social-media platforms, the bread and butter of their operations. “We don't, I don’t think, as a committee really know how to get socks on the octopus, so to speak, here because it's complicated," California Democrat Rep. Anna Eshoosaid on Wednesday. “Free speech is central to us. But we also know that there are bad actors that have used the best of what we have invented to divide us, and something needs to be done about that.” Republican Rep. Greg Walden added, “I’ve had consumers complain to me about what they believe to be the use of algorithms that have disproportionately affected them.” Concern over users’ digital privacy extends to other branches of government, too. “I don’t, but I know most people have the phones in the beds with them,” Justice Sonia Sotomayorlamented on Wednesday. “It’s an appendage now.”

The sentiment has emerged on Capitol Hill in more explicit ways, too, with Trump-appointed F.C.C. Chairman Ajit Pai railing against Big Tech companies to drum up support for his plan to obliterate Obama-era net-neutrality guidelines. In a speech on Tuesday, he claimed that companies’ content moderation is a bigger threat to a free and open Internet than a net-neutrality rollback. “They might cloak their advocacy in the public interest,” he said, “but the real interest of these Internet giants is in using the regulatory process to cement their dominance in the Internet economy.” He explicitly argued that Twitter’s moves to moderate and occasionally remove content on its platform is the real threat, citing the company’s decision in October to block a campaign ad for Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn over an “inflammatory” line about abortion. Pai doubled down the next day at an event at the Media Institute in Washington. “Everything nowadays is political,” he said. “[And] this view that politics-is-all is often made worse by social media.”

If the events of 2016 were the proximate cause for outrage against social-media platforms, the events of 2017 may stamp out any remaining faith users have in tech companies. Disclosures of massive data breaches from Equifax and Uber exposed millions of users’ personal information. Advertisers have boycotted Google’s YouTube over extremist content on its site and inappropriate, abusive videos and comments aimed at children. Sixty-two percent of Americans consider online harassment a major problem, and 41 percent say they’ve personally experienced it. Even more alarmingly, about half of Americans say they don’t trust the government or social-media platforms to protect their personal data.

Other tech companies seem to be learning from the mistakes of the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Google, and are designing their apps accordingly. Such is the case with Snapchat parent company Snap. C.E.O. Evan Spiegel, whose company has struggled after its debut to the public markets this year, even as Facebook has tried again and again to replicate the features that made Snapchat a runaway success with millennials, said as much in an op-ed on Wednesday. “Social media fueled ‘fake news’ because content designed to be shared by friends is not necessarily content designed to deliver accurate information,” Spiegel wrote. Snapchat’s algorithms are superior, he argued, because they’re “based on your interests—not on the interests of ‘friends’—and to make sure media companies also profit off the content they produce for our Discover platform. We think this helps guard against fake news and mindless scrambles for friends or unworthy distractions.”

Snapchat’s redesign, which it detailed publicly yesterday, is intended to boost engagement and draw in new users with a risky bet: that users will forego the popularity aspect of traditional social media for intimacy. “While many people view Snapchat as a social-media service, it is primarily used to talk with friends—like visual texting,” Spiegel said. “Snapchat began as an escape from social media, where people could send photos and videos to their friends without the pressure of likes, comments, and permanence.” At a time when the toxicity of many social-media platforms has caused many users to spurn them, perhaps Spiegel is onto something.

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